Socratic dialogue is an important way to get students to begin working with their own ideas and the ideas of others, clarifying what they think and why they think it, and then refining their thoughts as a result of the discussion.
Benefits of Socratic Dialogue
Socratic dialogue is beneficial for all students, including English learners, because it gets students discussing the content verbally. It gives students opportunities to take the content off the page and actually engaging with it kinesthetically, visually, and verbally. It becomes a tool for language acquisition.
Socratic dialogue can be implemented with any subject matter, including ELA and social studies. It asks students to build a framework for working with their own ideas and the ideas of others, and then to begin building a framework for acquiring new knowledge.
How to Implement Socratic Dialogue in the Classroom
With the deliberate and intentional implementation of Socratic dialogue in your class, you will start to change the culture of your classroom. To do this, you must set and maintain expectations, while taking concrete steps to encourage students to begin to work with their own ideas and the ideas of others.
There are five things you can do right away to ensure that your students are making the kind of lasting, meaningful connections that result in deeper learning.
1. Use Why-How-What Model to Ask Questions.
To master the art of effective Socratic dialogue, educators must move away from asking fact-finding questions. These are simple requests for information, such as what is a goldfinch? What is friction? Who was Abraham Lincoln?
Instead, implementing Socratic dialogue in your classroom requires the use of higher-order questions. A good rule of thumb is, if Google can answer it, it's not a higher-order question.
To understand what makes a higher-order question, it can be helpful to use the why-how-what model of questioning.
Here’s an example of a higher-order question created in the why-how-what model, that explores heredity, traits, and adaptations.
- Begin with why: Why do you think the bird is called a goldfinch?
- Then ask how: How could being gold or yellow in color be helpful?
- End with what: What would it mean if our hypothesis that males and females have different coloring? What might that actually be useful for in nature?
That is an example of the why-how-what model of questioning. After each question, wait for students to respond and then listen carefully to their responses to determine how to follow up. This is an effective way to train students to think critically.
Another important benefit of asking higher-order questions is promoting creativity and diversity of thought. They help to reduce the unintentional bias that comes from simpler questions, which don’t create space for differing opinions and experiences.
2. Identify Big Ideas and Organize Them in a Storyline
If you're a KnowAtom user, this is already done for you. The KnowAtom curriculum identifies big ideas as key concepts in each storyline. These are what we want r students to develop an understanding of as they move through the lesson.
It’s important to remember that these big ideas come from the standards themselves. They weave a connecting storyline through the study of science as the basis of nature itself and of crosscutting concepts. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provide performance expectations that live on beyond a single lesson or unit. When we introduce them to students as clusters, it helps students identify the interconnectedness of these types of big ideas and concepts.
3. Create 1-2 Higher Order Questions Around Each Big Idea as Backup Seed Questions to Help Students Transition Through Big Ideas
Higher order questions should promote critical thinking along the lines of a concept map. If you're acting as a moderator, having one or two higher order questions connected to each big idea in the story is a good way to help transition between them. By promoting students to make connections between the concepts, you can help transition from one big idea to the next.
To do this successfully, try to avoid linear questions like: Are all traits inherited? Are all behaviors learned?
Instead, use nonlinear questions that use the why-how-what model and help the class to pivot towards their next inquiry.
4. Create Space for Students’ Ideas
Remember in a traditional model of instruction, students aren’t typically asked to actively reason using their own ideas or when thinking about the ideas of others, especially using arguing from evidence. To begin building these critical thinking skills in our students, it requires educators to give them time to listen carefully, to reserve judgment, and to take their ideas seriously to get them to open up and embrace a Socratic dialogue.
5. Be Okay with Ten Seconds of Silence
If you begin to create a culture of Socratic thinking in your classroom, then over the course of ten weeks, it will start to become the way that students practice thinking like scientists and engineers in the classroom. They will begin to identify connections to past learning or their own lives, and better understand how the concepts being explored in the classroom connect to the world around them.
This embodies the intent of the new science standards, and leads to deeper learning in the classroom.
